Tag: small screen

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A mosaicist’s pebble

Today with my workout I watched Eight Men Out, which I have seen before but not for years, probably decades. If you’ve only seen one movie by John Sayles, it’s probably that one. I have seen most of the movies by John Sayles and also read two novels. I love John Sayles. He is one of my favorite directors and filmwriters, and incidentally or perhaps not I also love his two more recent novels. I always feel weird knowing that Eight Men Out is the one people have seen, though, and watching it again showed me why. I feel like a brilliant mosaicist has just handed me one really beautiful pebble.

Mosaicists are quite good at picking pebbles! It’s their job. This one is green. And under another circumstance, he is very well aware that he could make it someone’s eye, or a tree, or a flower. But this one is just one pebble, very smooth, self-contained.

It’s the self-contained part that gets me, because…nothing else Sayles does is like that. Nothing. And I can see the places where he doesn’t go off the map. Arnold Rothstein, Ring Lardner, Kennesaw Mountain Landis–I can almost hear him whispering to himself: not now, John. Reel it in, John. He doesn’t tell you about Joe Jackson’s hometown. About Fred McMullin’s connection to Bill Burns. Not a whisper, even, of the influenza pandemic that directly affected the game, and that’s the thing that made me sit upright and say–aloud to myself, because I am a terrible television companion, I talk to the screen–this is a John Sayles movie? This?

Because he knows all this stuff, and more to the point, he cares about all this stuff. He cares about all the connections, the way that it all fits together. He cares about whether any of the Black Sox were ever on record favoring votes for women. What their various attitudes were to the actually Black people around the stadium. 1988 John Sayles is still John Sayles–he still makes sure there’s a Black person having a line about how it’s the best white team he’s ever seen. But he manages, in this one movie, in 1988, just this, not to go into that man’s story. Not to go into the wives’ stories. To keep the neighborhood kids’ stories only in their emotions about baseball, not their home lives, not their ambitions. Just this.

He makes a baseball movie that is substantially–almost uniquely, among baseball movies–about baseball. He could have passed the Bechdel test in it, if the Bechdel test had existed and if he’d wanted to, by having Helen Weaver and Rose Cicotte talk earnestly about the new tighter-wound baseballs they were talking of using next year–because all of these characters, all of them, eat, sleep, and breathe baseball. I would absolutely have believed it.

I can’t recommend it if you don’t like baseball. Because it’s about class, and it’s about how power structures like these corrupt. It’s about the end of a gilded age, and labor, and who gets left holding the bag, sure. It’s still a John Sayles movie. If you watched it at a John Sayles film fest–oh, what a beautiful thought that is–the kind of people who would show up for that, the kind of people like me, would be stifling full on horror queen shrieks when Kennesaw Mountain Landis came on screen. “He cleared out the Reds during the War”–oh run, children, run, this is not going to be good. Do people who are watching this as their only John Sayles movie know that? I think the message comes through, but…not in the same way without the rest of the body of work. The implication, the denouement, are so feather-light. It feels so strange to take it in isolation like this. To know that for so many people this speck of green is not going on to Matewan, it’s not going on to A Moment in the Sun, it’s not touching Lone Star or Brother or any of that, the mosaic that is class and corruption and America is not part of a leaf, it’s just its own flash and then gone.

And then there’s this: this man’s pebble is a full two-hour feature film. This is what he does for flash fiction.

I wish there was such a thing as a John Sayles film fest. I do. Because it makes me understand a little, though I try to fight it, why people invest personal identity in their fandoms. Because the sort of person who would show up for a whole weekend of John Saylesiana…well, I won’t say I’d like all of those people, but I think they’d inevitably have to have some substantial interests and personality traits overlapping with some of mine. And it would be interesting to talk to other people who have gone all in on all the other much messier works about this one much tidier one.

I believe reining himself in made this more accessible. More popular. I don’t think it’s an accident that the one where he told this story and just this story is the one people know. And it’s a good film, I’m not saying it’s not. But I am left wanting all the rest of the mosaics. I’m left so relieved, so incredibly relieved, that he made all the other films, that he wrote those big messy books, that are full of connection and depth and…a little bit of chaos. Even if it means that I am left flailing trying to get anyone who doesn’t already live here to talk about A Moment in the Sun with me. (“Wanna read a thousand pages of fiction about America in 1905? Hey, where are you going?”) I’m willing to indulge this one cleanly told story. But you can get a cleanly told story almost anywhere. With Sayles I want the whole thing. I know it’s a lot. I’m a lot too, John. I can take more than just the pebble.

It’s a really nice green, though, I’ll give you that.

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Indirection and the horrors of the moment

Last week I finished watching Season 2 of The Good Fight on CBS Some Access (that’s not what they call it, but…welp). I really loved the show from which it’s a spin-off, The Good Wife, and they kept some of my favorite characters and added a few new characters I like a lot. All the things that frustrated me most about the original show were gone, plus they had kept the rich and extensive universe of characters going. Yet I found watching this season a slog–I was going downstairs to watch it with my workout with a little distaste rather than a lot of excitement–so I had to think about why.

The Good Wife had fictional court cases inspired by real ones in recent headlines, starting from the first season. That wasn’t new. But The Good Fight doubled down on the contemporary references. It is a show that is entirely about American politics in 2018. There’s a lot that’s directly about Donald Trump and his effects on local and state level politics. There are also plotlines that are less inspired by and more copies of current events in other areas. Even plotlines that are supposedly about the characters’ love lives are often also about the fate of protesters or how candidates are presented in modern elections.

I sympathize. I do. There’s a lot out there, and sometimes just screaming into your pillow is not enough. Sometimes you really want to scream something in words, that someone else can hear. Words like, “What is even going on,” and, “I am not okay with any of this.” I get it. But I think that there’s a paradoxical effect where the closer you get to an actual nonfiction commentary without being one, the harder it is to take.

I think the people who wrote M*A*S*H are a great counterexample here. M*A*S*H is set during the Korean War, but even a cursory glance tells you it wasn’t about the Korean War. It was about the Vietnam War. Not only does the quagmire timeline not make sense for the US’s presence in Korea, none of the characters’ backstories do either. Anyone over the age of 22–so all of the main characters except Radar and maybe Klinger–but probably just Radar–should have WWII experience if they’re regular Army. If they’re not, they should still have the perspective that came of having their country in an all-out world war within the last decade. But they don’t seem to. What they do have, eventually, is Colonel Potter, the old-timer with world war experience that he’s always hearkening back to–but not recent experience, of course. This makes no literal sense, but it makes complete emotional sense when you consider that the show is really about the US troops in Vietnam instead.

Why bother? Why use one war to comment on another? Why remove your characters that far? If they wanted to talk about current events, why didn’t they? For me, one of the answers is: it can get overwhelming. Dealing with news stories and then having your fictional entertainment copy those same news stories exactly: it’s too much of one thing. Which is bad enough when that one thing is chocolate peanut butter ice cream, far worse when it’s a specific corruption charge.

Another answer is broader thinking. One particular policy discussion can start to fall into “denounce this one thing, this one thing is bad.” In real life, that can be necessary! But art gives us the chance to look for patterns. To ask, what kind of thing is this, where have I seen it before, where might I see it again, would it still be bad in those contexts too or is there something specific to this one. What are my actual principles here, when removed from the immediacy of people I already know I trust or distrust? How would I react to a situation like this one if there were a few things different? and what does that tell me about this situation?

Of course my bias is toward indirect comment because I’m a science fiction writer. M*A*S*H may have been the first Vietnam War commentary I encountered, in reruns my parents watched while they were making supper, but The Forever War by Joe Haldeman is also pretty influential in my line of work. Haldeman is a Vietnam vet who had things to say–and he used the depth of hundreds of years to say them. Haldeman also wrote War Year and 1968, both of which are non-genre novels inspired by his experiences–both of which are very different from The Forever War. Indirection and shift of perspective give you different art, even when it’s coming from the same person.

I’m not giving up on The Good Fight. I hope that it manages to find its footing and a place to stand where it can create commentary that stretches beyond the current moment, that gives us a lens that allows us to look into that moment without damaging our eyes with the intensity. But my preference as a reader and as a writer is going to continue to be work that tries to find a different angle for perspective and illumination.

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Why, Miss A! You’re Beautiful Without Your Shift In Meaning!

A few months ago, we had to explain to my goddaughter the old trope where the hero takes off the heroine’s glasses and says, “Why, Miss A! You’re beautiful without your glasses!” Because…she has never known a world where she can’t get cute glasses in flattering styles and a wide variety of colors. That’s just how glasses are–and not because her parents are wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice, either. Some of my friends who are struggling a lot for money still browse dozens and hundreds of glasses styles on the internet, able to choose from more on their tight budget than the richest could have dreamed of on theirs 50 years ago–especially the richest children.

My parents tell stories of having one choice of glasses, sometimes one gendered choice–here you go, here are your glasses. Doesn’t flatter your face? Too bad, this is what you get. Glasses. Now you can see. The fashion for girls right now is cat’s eyes. Boys get square blocky ones. For me, it was a little better than that, but not much–and they were not well-fitted to my child’s head, on the assumption that kids were growing, and as a result they were always slipping down my nose, and–in a fairly low-parental-conflict childhood–my mother was always nagging me to push my glasses back up.

Meg Murry’s glasses did that too. In A Wrinkle in Time. It was one of the reasons I bonded with her instantly when I first read the book in grade school: ugh, the glasses thing.

My goddaughter doesn’t have that. Meg’s glasses slipping down her nose are an individual character trait for her, not a bonding moment for every kid with glasses. There is no presumption that obviously everyone would look better without theirs, because, hey, there are so many flattering pairs of glasses, she knows so many people who look great in them. She looks great in hers. And if some jerk ever tries to take her glasses off to tell her she’s beautiful without them, she hasn’t been prepared that that’s the only way this can ever work. The idea of finding someone who thinks she’s pretty great with them is not a massive shock. It’s…life, it’s reasonable, it’s how things are.

The entire meaning of that description has shifted.

So you can’t just put Meg Murry in a pair of glasses and film it that way, assume the modern viewer will get it–in fact, you can assume they won’t. Translation is like that. The past, we say over and over again, is a foreign country. Sometimes the recent past even more so, because we don’t think of what we’re not seeing. We don’t have to explain chamber pots and carriages in the Murry home. Glasses are known technology, aren’t they? We understand glasses, don’t we? Oh.

And then there’s the hair.

This article on Meg’s natural hair in the movie is really good, really interesting. It quotes from the book, and I’m going to repeat the quote: “Meg’s hair had been passable as long as she wore it tidily in plaits. When she went into high school it was cut, and now she and her mother struggled with putting it up, but one side would come out curly and the other straight.”

Pretty straightforward, right?

Well.

A Wrinkle in Time has a 1962 publication date. Before the hippie era. So…I think younger readers mostly don’t understand the implications of women’s hair here. The passive voice is not accidental: when she went into high school it was cut. This is basically a force of nature, in social terms of the time. Wearing her hair in the braids that actually worked for (book) Meg is no longer an option because that is little kid hair. If you find a high school yearbook from the early 1960s, especially in a small town, you are not seeing the option of long hair worn straight or in braids yet. That came later. So what has happened here is that there are requirements of existing in the teen social world, between the kid world and the adult world, and Meg’s hair is failing her at them. Imagine one of the bouffants from a 1962 yearbook, but done poorly. That is what they mean by “up.” It is “done,” it is done with a fair amount of AquaNet or equivalent, it is one of the miserable child faces underneath a failed elaborate coiffure, because an extremely simple hairstyle of whatever length was not one of the options at the time.

Some of this is universal. Hair texture changes at puberty–sometimes daily–and it can feel impossible to work with whatever you got. And figuring out what on earth other people think is stylish and why on earth they think that is even more difficult when “people” means “whoever I am randomly assigned by geography” rather than “someone I have any interests in common with.” But…I think that people who post-date the hippie era–myself included, on some emotional levels–have difficulty conceiving just how many more options there are for What People Can Look Like, what we can do our hair like, what we can do our clothes like, what we can reject or choose for makeup or nails or any other grooming options.

And so…if you showed a modern audience. Especially a modern child audience. The vision of Meg that was in Madeleine L’Engle’s head for Meg. The hair that had “been cut” and “put up,” the failed bouffant. It would be fundamentally not understood. Even if she was surrounded by other ’62 teenagers in a ’62 high school. The reaction, I think, would be, “What happened to her hair? Why did she do that?” Because as modern viewers, we just don’t have the context of the range of bad hair in the past. We know what present teen struggles with hair look like. We have no reason to keep the data set for 1962.

Similarly, if you filmed the fancy dress occasions of the 1920s, exactly as imagined by F. Scott Fitzgerald–the brilliantine on the gentlemen’s hair would overwhelm us as modern viewers. And so on through history. It just…gets adjusted for the modern viewer. Inherently. Because the world is large, history is large, we cannot keep it all in our head. Every movie made from a book is a translation. No matter how faithful to the text it tries to be. It’s still a translation. The more so for a movie that’s more than a year or two from its source text.

So–read the article in the link about how Ava DuVernay decided to translate Meg’s struggles with her hair. It is a translation, a visual translation, or a transformation, but it’s a necessary one even if the movie had decided to do other things than what it did with race (of which I thoroughly approve), because the world has gone on. I haven’t seen this movie yet. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to–I hear that it’s one of the most vertigo-inducing movies made in a very vertigo-inducing recent crop of movies. But I think that this particular choice of visual translation of Meg’s struggles with her hair is a brilliant one. It’s one that has some chance of making sense to a modern audience in a way that a literal rendering of the original just couldn’t. And the minute I hear people talk about filming what’s on the page, I know that they’re missing how books and film work differently as media–much less books and film across time.

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Why you deserve it

I have just finished watching season 1 of Skin Wars on a friend’s recommendation. It is very very far from my usual sort of thing: it’s a reality show that’s a competition in body painting. My friend promised that it was very low on the interpersonal cattiness/drama, with lots of very skilled work and a certain amount of people learning stuff about their art, learning from each other. New art and learning? Hey, I’m there for that. And I was immediately hooked, and I will definitely watch the other two seasons, especially since my friend is a person who would have warned me if there was a lot of body-shaming weirdness in store.

One of the things that fascinates me is that the artists involved in this were often financially struggling–it’s not a fast route to fame and fortune–and they had pretty well-entrenched justifications for why they deserved success that were not always easy to dislodge by circumstances that really should have dislodged them. Examples:

—I have put in the time. I have worked long hours. This is a competition with firmly set time limits, around each piece and around the competition as a whole. Each artist gets literally exactly the same amount of time. There are no examples of artists putting their feet up and being done early, and beyond that here is absolutely no way for anyone to put in more time than anyone else. Eventually this got clarified to:

—I have put in the time. I spent my whole life learning this. Finally someone turned to the person who kept repeating this and said, how old are you? and determined that they were very close to the same age. And that they had both spent their whole life learning it, so…yeah. Not a distinguishing feature. I’ve seen both of these at conventions, though: I have devoted more time to science fiction than the other people at my day job! And I’ve seen a certain amount of it in various factions in the field who are convinced that they are the ones who are truly, deeply devoted–and that that kind of devotion has to be what matters. (Spoiler: it does not have to be. Sorry.)

—I need it the most. My living conditions are worse than other people’s without recognition. There are indeed need-based scholarships for various types of study, and I’m very glad. But they’re usually clearly labeled, and “I like your art a lot” and “I think you need money” are not actually the same thing–and “you should like my art a lot because I need money” doesn’t actually work very well.

—I need it the most. I poured my heart into this piece. “You should like my art a lot because I need validation” does not turn out to work better than “you should like my art a lot because I need money.” It is often a great idea to pour your heart into art. I recommend it. Then make more art and pour your heart into that. Also technique at the same time.

—I have the most technical skills. Ever heard a pianist play Hanon? They are finger exercises. They are finger exercises, they are to make you a technically better pianist, and nobody plays them in concert because they are no fun to listen to. (Or play. Freakin’ Hanon.) Okay, okay, they have a certain hypnotic power, they can be impressive, but…at the end of the day if you are showing up and playing Hanon, nobody is buying your book, your painting, or in the most literal sense, tickets to your piano concert. (Freakin’ Hanon.)

It is apparently really, really hard to say, “Mine is good. Here is what I did well. Look at this part. I deserve this because mine is really good art. I combined the technical and the creative, this has thought and feeling and everything it’s supposed to have, and who cares whether I picked up those skills in two minutes or ten million hours, who cares whether someone else thinks that they are overall better than me and paid their dues more than me, here is the thing I made, it doesn’t come with dues, it comes with awesome.”

It is even harder to say, “I don’t know what’s missing. I did everything right. It’s just not happening for me. Can you help me see what’s going wrong in my piece?” And sometimes there are ten million answers, and sometimes there’s one answer, and sometimes there…isn’t. And sometimes the artificial contest structure of a reality show has made something happen that reality doesn’t support, it has made a thing where there is a winner and a loser where actually in a group of ten there might be three pieces that really work and four that don’t and three that meh, or ten that meh, or any other combination of numbers.

But the attachment to previous explanations of why you deserve it, the strength of that: that really got fascinating for me, and I will be riveted to see whether that continues for future seasons.

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Listen to Kenny Rogers, storytellers.

Know when to walk away. Know when to run.

I am a big fan of the TV show The Good Wife, and by “a big fan” I mean “a person who is behind by a full season at this point,” but that doesn’t make my enthusiasm less strong, it just means that I am physically incapable of watching broadcast and, eh, life. But I really do love this show. It’s one of the best shows I’ve ever watched. I’m looking forward to watching every episode, and when Alec visits, I am now watching every episode a second time so that I can enjoy them with him.

The network confirmed a few weeks ago what those of us who pay attention to title structure* already know: that this season, season seven, is the last season of The Good Wife. And I am glad. Because I used to be a fan of Criminal Minds, and I’m currently watching S10 of it with my workout. And uff da. Uff da. It is the shambling corpse of the show I used to love.

One of the episodes I watched yesterday tied up a plot thread that had been left from season two. And it did so in the most inane and simplistic way possible, taking all emotional complexity out of the equation, just: yep, this thing happened. We were sad. There was another person sad too. We tried to comfort him. People knew each other in the past. The end.

So it’s clearly not that people run out of plot, because there was some plot, just sitting around right there unused, and they used it. It’s something else that happens. The momentum runs out. The elastic wears out, the story needs a belt and suspenders to keep going. A lot of shows that get to be a train wreck as time goes on, it’s clear that there was plot yet to happen, they just…couldn’t wrangle it all as they tried to go and go and go.

So get in. Tell your story. And for the love of little green turtles get out again. And when a story you love ends–not when it’s cut off, but when it comes to an actual ending–be glad that it had the grace to do so, instead of becoming its own self-parody.

(I refer to the fourth Brunette Agent on Criminal Minds as O. If you name the first two Elle and Em, you cannot blame me for calling the next two N and O. Brunette women: not interchangeable! Come on, show! I hear tell that O is not long for this show. I do not look forward to P. Why am I still watching this show about how you are not safe in your home, or also if you leave your home you are not safe, and especially on the internet you are not safe? Because for as terrible as it is now, it’s still the right pace for my workouts. Sigh.)

What if people don’t like the next thing you do as well as this thing? Well. Then they don’t. That’s a risk. They also might not like this thing as well as this thing.

What if you can’t think of a next thing? Eat some strawberries (or an orange if you are allergic to strawberries; whatever). Take a walk where there are trees. Breathe.

What if people nag you and nag you and they spend the rest of your life nagging you about the thing you did that they liked so much? Remember that it is great when people like things you make, but it does not make them the boss of you, and it does not excuse them from polite behavior. And it is far better to be begged for more of your art than to be begged to stop.

Now go on. Know when to hold ’em, but err on the side of folding ’em.

*Season one of The Good Wife had one-word episode titles. Season two, two-word episode titles. And so on until season five, which had three-word episode title again, and Tim and I turned to each other and said, “Well, guess it’s a seven-season show, then. Cool.”

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The stupid mistakes of smart people (are not the same)

I have talked in this space before about how I watch a bunch of cop shows, largely because I watch them while working out. This has advantages (pacing! hurrah pacing!). It also has disadvantages, because dang, are some of the things paced the way I need them to be…kind of obvious, honestly. It’s like you can see the places where they said, “[Find motivation for character here],” and then never did a search on brackets. Except that I’m not convinced that they did. I’m not convinced that in every case there was someone saying, “Uh…that motivation makes no sense.”

Here’s the thing. It’s not that smart people don’t make stupid mistakes. For whatever axis of “smart” you have decided is important in this consideration, you can come up with obvious, boneheaded mistakes that people with lots of that kind of “smarts” will make.

BUT THEY’RE NOT RANDOM MISTAKES.

If you’ve established that a character is both street-smart and good at math, having them decide to go into debt to a loan shark with no known plan of repayment is so far out of character that you have to seriously jump through hoops to justify it. (Yes, actual example.)

That same character might underestimate an opponent’s competence in a number of areas. They might rely on contacts who didn’t come through this time. They might do any of a number of “dumb” things. But for heaven’s sake, make them dumb things that fit. You only get so many foolish choices without it looking like you’re making things too convenient for yourself, or without losing sympathy for the character, or without undermining their characterization as smart. There are all sorts of failure modes here, and you don’t have to give your character perfect decision-making skills to dodge them.

Something that is helpful here: if you have an idea of what a small characteristic error looks like for your character, you can seed that to ramify into the larger ones later, so that a reader doesn’t say, “They’d never make that mistake!” But it does have to ramify throughout, or it doesn’t work.

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Excitement! Suspense! Cliffhangers! Or…not.

Further in my watching of ten gajillion cop shows with my workouts, I have noticed an alarming tendency to try to add suspense in all the wrong places. Not every season has to end with a cliffhanger. If people like your show, they will keep watching your show.

I repeat: NOT EVER SEASON HAS TO END WITH A CLIFFHANGER.

But if you do choose to end your season (chapter, whatever piece of your narrative arc) with a cliffhanger, for the love of Pete can you make it one that actually…cliffhangs? Competently?

For example: “Will this be the end for the group of people this story focuses on?” No. No it will not. Everyone knows it will not. Exactly zero cop shows ever have completely disbanded their unit after that kind of cliffhanger, and the ones that have sort of disbanded it (The Wire S1 into S2) did not make it a cliffhanger. They just said: yup, now we are shifting these characters around to do something different. “Will [only female character] perish in a watery grave?” I’m just going to guess no there. “Will [main protagonist] spend his life in jail for a murder he didn’t commit?” Also going with no.

And okay, yes, if you’re doing it right, the suspense is not whether they will get out of something but how–but in the cases above, the “how” looks pretty obvious. How will [only female character] not perish in a watery grave? Well, by swimming or by having one of the others pick her up in a boat, I’m guessing. Haven’t seen that one yet, so we’ll see. And how will [main protag] get out of jail for a murder he didn’t commit? In a cop show–except for The Wire pretty much universally invested in the system working–I’m going to guess exonerating evidence. Wheee. So could you please stop pretending that we don’t know these things?

Putting a secondary character in peril is more effective than putting a protag in peril if you have established a reason for us to be interested in the secondary character–and if we actually believe you’d carry through with it. By the time you’ve watched a season of a show (read several chapters of the book, etc.), you have some idea whether it’s the sort of show that would let a bad guy murder a 4-year-old. That kind of show has to signal its turns pretty early on, or they will put off the people who are watching it to unwind of an evening with a little light mystery. We live in a narrative-savvy age. You have to roll with it.

Also more effective: putting a protag in non-mortal peril of a kind you’d carry through with. Fiction does horrible things to series protags as long as it lets them keep protagging. “Maybe their spouse will leave them or die!” Yep, unless the spouse is seriously major in the show (El in White Collar, for example), that can happen. “Maybe they will be demoted but still able to do the stuff we thought was interesting about them!” Yep. “Maybe they will have an injury they will have to work through in implausible PT episodes!” Wait, that’s a different gripe. (LEGEND OF KORRA PT FAIL ARGH.) You can make them sad. You can make them lonely. You can make them injured. We know these things happen to protags, so we can actually worry that they will happen this time.

Tim and I had a beautiful alternate universe Criminal Minds for the season in which there was an SUV explosion and it was strongly implied one of the team members was in the SUV at the time. In the time between seasons, we lovingly detailed the adventures of Aaron Hotchner after he had recovered from his massive burns and was dealing with trying to run the BAU from a wheelchair while doing actual rehab so the scar tissue wouldn’t cripple his fine motor control and still raise his son. But we knew they would never, ever do it. The question for the beginning of that season was “how will they cheat,” not “who will be killed or maimed.” And really, “how will they cheat” is pretty much always less satisfying suspense. It’s got the viewer/reader thinking about the creator, not the characters. Not what we want.

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Things I Learned From Watching Cop Shows

1. If someone close to you is brutally murdered and you feel the urge to ask the police, “Do I need a lawyer?”, YOU NEED A LAWYER. Possibly even if they are gently murdered.

2. All people in the British Isles get their exercise by running very close to the edge of cliffs. Nobody in the UK or Ireland goes to the gym or runs on pavement or in a forest or something. Always a cliff, usually with no guard rail.

3. It is totally normal for a very recent widow or widower to make sexual advances to a police officer or other investigating detective. No one finds this suspicious. They should, of course, because it nearly always turns out to be relevant to the case. But apparently there are tons of cases we don’t see in which, “My spouse died this morning, helloooooo Officer Friendly!” is one of the stages of grief that Kubler-Ross missed, because no one ever goes, “hmm, that’s weird, possibly I should consider why this is happening other than my incredible personal magnetism.”

4. When people say that poker is a game that relies on skill and the better player will win in the long-term, they mean that ten to twenty hands should do it. It’s best if you form an elaborate plan for catching murderers (or other criminals!) that relies on someone on your investigative team winning one particular hand at one particular moment, with no way to cheat with the deck or dealer. That should be fine.

5. Boxing, on the other hand, is something that boxers don’t spend years training to do well. You can throw a random tough person at boxing and have them win at a crucial moment to catch a bad guy. Tracking down evidence is usually secondary to this.

6. If you worry enough about doing the right thing, no one will care that you never actually do it.

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PT/OT, TV

Last week I was watching yet another murder mystery on television with my workout–really, on any given day, it’s a good bet that I will be watching at least one murder mystery on television with my workout, sometimes two depending on how long they are–and this time it featured a character who had been seriously injured and could not walk. And whenever I see that, I wince, because I know that they’re more than 50% likely to do dodgy PT/OT on screen, and in fact they did.

See, on TV, PT and OT are the same thing. Here is what they both consist of: there are the two parallel bars at armpit height, and the person who cannot walk is supposed to walk between them, and the PT/OT/random relative of the person who cannot walk yells at them to walk. And mostly they eventually do. Isn’t that easy? Isn’t that great? Why can’t everybody walk unassisted by now! How straightforward it all is! And why do people bother to go to school to learn to do PT or OT when anyone–the janitor, the hospital administrator, in fact the random relative of the person who cannot walk–could quite easily do this task?

SIGH.

And I know that the actors who play these characters who cannot walk are usually themselves able-bodied. But the PT/OT characters never do anything like, for example, making sure the characters they are supposed to be helping are stepping down on the correct part of their foot, by which I mean the bottom. I know that gait problems are one of the things the able-bodied can see when they watch someone with assistive devices walking, but they’re also one of the things that therapy will be working to correct, and they don’t show up out of nowhere. “I was in a car accident, and now I walk on the sides of my feet for no reason!” No, and also no. There’s a reason you don’t see people with visible gait problems walking around without assistive devices very often: incurable gait problems make it very hard to walk without them. So if you’re aiming for unassisted walking, you’re going to try to correct the gait if at all possible. A therapist worth their salt will notice that you are setting your feet down sideways and will stop you and work to correct it. They may remove you from the Parallel Bars of Doom and set you to doing different exercises somewhere else.

But that can’t be right, because being shouted at to walk is the only therapy anyone who cannot walk needs, right?

Another thing that never happens: nobody on TV ever needs to be told to slow down and take a rest, because we always need to be yelled at to do more and try harder. So no physical therapist ever says, “You’re not doing yourself any more good here, you’re just wearing yourself out.” Even though in people close to me alone, I can think of four physical therapy examples where the therapist said, “Now for heaven’s sake don’t do more than X amount, because it won’t help and might hurt you.” But on TV, no. Never.

(Yes, I know that sometimes you do PT and are told to just do it for as much as you can stand, until you drop, etc. It’s just that this is the only mode I see represented on TV.)

This is just sloppy, and I’m very tired of it. Physical therapy and occupational therapy are not the same thing, and between them they cover all kinds of activities to rehabilitate all kinds of body systems. If you’re someone who writes fiction, please think about portraying something different for your PT or OT. If you don’t know what that might include, do some research. There are physical therapists and occupational therapists and lots and lots of people who have been through one or both, and I bet you can easily find boatloads of us who are willing to talk about our experiences and the details that do not involve walking on the sides of your feet between two bars and being yelled at.

Oh, wait. I’m being unfair. Sometimes people who can’t walk also get to go swimming for their PT/OT. Nothing much happens there except they go swimming. Well. I take it all back, then. I was very, very wrong.

Seriously, if you have some examples of PT/OT on TV done better than this, please recommend them to me in the comments.

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Small screen suggestions?

I watch a bunch of TV to get me through my workouts, and right now I don’t have a default thing of the right length that I’ve got momentum on, so I thought I would take the opportunity to ask for recommendations. I’ll list a bunch of things I’m in some sense “currently in the middle of,” and you can either suggest other stuff you think I might like or else ask what I like about the things I’ve listed. I am not current on anything: I watch DVDs or Netflix, so “current season” stuff will be spoilers for me.

Oh, and: I am a tough sell for sexual violence. It’s not a hard, fast line for me–for example, I watch Criminal Minds–but it’s pretty easy to hit my “this is no fun any more and I’m taking my marbles and going home” threshold on things like a certain popular soapy historical drama this season.

Shows I’m watching: Arrow, Avatar: The Legend of Korra, The Bletchley Circle, Elementary, The Good Wife, House of Cards, Inspector Lewis, The Killing, The Mentalist, Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, Ripper Street, Scandal, Sherlock, White Collar.

I am not at all limited to English language stuff, but the pacing of 22-minute episodes has to hit me right–some anime does and some doesn’t. Almost no live-action English-language stuff does. 55-minute shows can work, but they frustrate me because they’re pretty much exactly the wrong length for what I need for workouts. 40-to-44 are great, as are the 80-to-90 blocks.

Thoughts?